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Exalead Halloween Logo
Originally uploaded by Philipbradley.
Danny has done a great job of finding Halloween logos over at SearchEngine Land listing logos for Google, Ask, and Yahoo - here's another that I found for Exalead. Most of the other search engines haven't really entered into the spirit of the thing though.
Thanks to everyone who has emailed or commented on my recent post regarding Jill. I'm not making the comments public for obvious reasons, but have read all of them - thank you so much. We're still obviously in a state of shock at the moment, and waiting for the chemo to start - she's also deciding if she's going to volunteer for any of the trials that are available. We're going to have to quite radically re-think our lifestyle over the next few weeks and months, but we'll think about that a little bit further down the line. I've not been able to reply individually to comments/emails so please forgive me for that, but they are all tremendously helpful, so thanks again.
The Lo-Fi Librarian found Eleven Alternative Engines for Custom Searches Web Worker Daily. Little here that will come as much of a suprise - Kartoo, Clusty, Omgili, Grokker, Freeality - which I hadn't heard of, but it's a multi search engine of the 'lets drag links in so that you can choose for yourself' type, Ask City (an Ask product that works best in the US), ChaCha, MagPortal, which searches magazine and journal articles, Dogpile, Business.com and Trueveo for video. Nice overview, worth a quick look if you're not familiar with any of the ones listed.
Nothing in this post is anything but bad. The MRI scan confirmed that Jill's cancer has spread into her liver and is at such an advanced stage that it's both inoperable and terminal. She's going to be going onto chemotherapy which provides a life expectancy of - on average - 2.5 to 3 years. Without it we would be talking months, 6 at best. So now we know. Really not sure what else to say at this point.
Apparently I am the TypePad Featured Blog for October 9th over at TypePad. I have no idea why, but I'm sure it's all very nice, so thank you TypePad! :)
Ixquick Metasearch has improved their video search option by teaming up with blinkx, with more than 14,000,000 hours of audio, video, viral and tv content.
I gave the closing keynote at the Internet Librarian International 2007 conference on the subject of "Facing the challenge of Web 2.0 as a Disruptive Technology' and people seemed to like it. It's over at Slideshare if you want to take a look, but I've also enclosed a copy below. It doesn't format brilliantly, but it'll give you a flavour.
A Librarian’s Guide to Creating 2.0 Subject Guides is a really nice article looking at Squidoo, LibGuides, Koonji and a few more. Talks about what the resource is, and which, if any libraries, are using it. Worth a read!
I finally got around to looking at Google's My library offering. It's little short of a trainwreck and a complete waste of time. Let me explain...
We've all got bunches of books, so the ability to quickly and easily add them to a 'My library' function has to be paramount. There are two ways you can do it with Google - you can either give them a bunch of ISBNs, or you can search through the Book Search function and add books using the 'Add to My Library' function. Well, I've got some books on the LibraryThing resource that I thought I'd add - it's about 180 varied titles. I exported the list, cut and pasted the ISBNs into the Google My Library import box and got it to add them. Except that it came back with the error that it couldn't add 64 titles. Did it tell me which 64 titles it didn't add? No of course it didn't - that would be much too helpful for Google wouldn't it, though to be accurate their engineers probably arn't capable of that level of coding. So about one third of titles didn't get added and the only way I could find out which would be to go through by hand. The other problem is that they all had acceptable ISBNs - as far as LibraryThing and Amazon were concerned, and quite frankly I'm going to trust them above Google anytime.
The other method - of going through Google Book Search is fine - as long as Google as the title listed. If it doesn't then you're stuck, and it's the end of the line. Unlike other My Library programs where if the worst comes to the worst you can manually input the whole thing Google doesn't allow that. I'm also not impressed by the fact that Google thinks that Max Hasting's work on D-Day (his book Overlord is one of THE main works on the subject) is actually fiction. Dear God.
Exporting books is little better - simply an XML file, with no other options. Absolute rubbish.
So, having added a book, I can label it, which is great, except that it doesn't work well. I can add anything I want as a label, but when I want to go back and re-use existing labels Google doesn't appear to be able to separate out individual labels (although it does know they're individual since they appear as such in a listing under 'All my books'). If I want to add labels I have to look at what labels I already have first, add those, then add new ones. I can't pick and choose. This makes the function almost useless.
Searching my collection isn't bad, but it's not great either. I can run a search and it will pick up terms in the title or the summary, which is useful. However, it won't search on the keywords that I've added - I need to do that via a different search entirely. What moron at Google thought THAT was a good idea? What would also be useful would be an option to search the Google Book Search and exclude books that I already had in my library. Not hard really you'd think. Apparently it is for Google's engineers - can't do it.
Where's all the nice Web 2.0 functionality of something like LibraryThing? It's not there, that's what. Sure, I have an RSS version, but that's about it. Wasted opportunity again. At this point I really gave up on the product, though to be fair, thinking this review through while I was writing it did give rise to a phrase that I think I'm going to be using a lot in the future - 'If it's Google, it's crap'.
My advice - give this a miss entirely and don't waste any of your time on it. Use something like LibraryThing or Shelfari instead.
Visual Medical Dictionary from CureHunter looks promising. The main screen is split into 3 panes, with a search option over on the left. Typing in a term then allows you to select what you're interested in - I was searching for cataract and had the option of looking at the disease or the select therapy/procedure. A mouseover provides more information if you're not sure which you want to see.
Clicking on your choice then brings up a proper definition in the middle pane with a context tree, while the larger right had pane provides a visual offering, with cataract right at the centre, with various spokes of related subjects radiating out. Obviously I can then click on any of those if I wish. Clicking on my subject again returns a Patient-Physician research summary report (well, it will if I pay over my money - the main downside to this service is that it's not entirely free, but they have to make a living I guess!), and I also get to see some sample data on the subject. This includes key therapy, disease context article count and diseases related to. Though access to all of this data is at a charged service depending on what you're looking at.
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